User:Jamesjiao/How to Create a Mandarin entry

These instructions are intended to be an easy, step-by-step guide on how to create a basic, well-formatted Chinese entry on Wiktionary. This may be useful for users who find the Wiktionary:About_Chinese guide a little overwhelming and just want something simple they can follow.

This is the bare minimum amount of information a well-formatted Chinese entry on Wiktionary has. Now, you're probably thinking... that's a hell of a lot of information! True, it does take some getting used to. But all this information is essential in making the project as streamlined and easy to navigate as possible. What I do is keep a copy of this "template" in a Notepad file, and just copy and paste it for each new entry I make.

Wiktionary caters for all dialects. If it's Mandarin, leave this as is. If it's Cantonese, put ==Cantonese==, etc. This particular guide will only focus on the formatting requirements for a Mandarin entry - other dialects have other requirements. Check out Wiktionary:About_Chinese for more information.

If the entry has both a simplified and a traditional form, the simplified goes in the first section of the "forms" part. Make sure you link to each individual character in the word ([[扳]][[机]]) so the user can break down the word into its individual characters. Now put the Traditional Chinese form in the second lot of brackets - [[扳機]].

If the entry is both simplified and traditional, the forms field is replaced by hanzi. Note that you still break down the individual characters here using the double brackets ([[]]). See 暗示 for example.

I highly recommend you use the Tong Wen Tang Firefox extension to allow you to convert between forms with the click of a button. If you don't use Firefox, Chinese-tools.com's converter is also useful, though not as quick.

Yep, I know some of them are a bit inconsistent... we are working on that. Still, the vast majority of the commonest parts of speech (or "PoS" as it is commonly referred to) start with {{cmn-. Thus it is easy to just type in and replace your template's noun with whatever PoS you need.

Here the letter s stands for "simplified". So if your entry is in Simplified Chinese, leave this as is. If it is in Traditional Chinese, put t instead. If your entry is both in Simplified and Traditional put ts.

In first part pin= put in your entry's pinyin, including tonemarks. In pint= put in the pinyin with the tone marks as numbers (i.e. 1 = first tone, 2 = second tone, etc). This is important as it sorts the entry in wiktionary alphabetically. Also, please note that if your entry is a proper noun, the pinyin in pin= must be capitalised (e.g. pin=Aòzhōu), HOWEVER in pint= you must type it in lower case (pint=ao4zhou1) for sorting purposes.

To input the pinyin quickly and effortlessly I highly recommend you download the Firefox extension Pinyin Input. If you don't use firefox you can also check out this Pinyin Editor.

The traditional form goes in tra and the simplified form goes in sim. If your entry is both traditional and simplified you can simply delete these fields, but only those fields - don't delete the pinyin fields (pin=, pint-) or the rs= field to come!

As with the first step, I highly recommend you use the New Tong Wen Tang Firefox extension to convert between the two forms.

The rs field stands for "radical stroke (number)". This field is here so people who don't use pinyin can find a Chinese entry on Wiktionary by looking up its radical and the number of additional strokes in the character. To get your rs value look up the first character of your word in Wiktionary. For example, for 扳机 you look up 扳. Then scroll down to where it says Translingual. Under Translingual it says 扳 (radical 64 手+4... This tells you that 扳 contains 手 as its primary radical, plus an extra 4 strokes. Thus the rs value for 扳 is 手04. (Note that if the number of additional strokes is under 10 you must put a zero before the number - 手01, 手02, 手03, etc.)

Now you can put in the definition of the word. Feel free to make links to any words which you think the user will want to click on. If the entry has more than one definition, you can list them on seperate lines using #.